Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition

by Jack X. McCallum

  As the oxygen went to his head, Kraft slyly ruminated on his actual reason for being here at this time. He may have been as old as the century, but he still knew a piece of ass when he saw it, and he wanted to get a peek or two when the doctors gave the Monroe clone her physical. Maybe she’ll be naked, he thought, sucking pure O2. At the very least, she’ll be wearing one of those examination gowns and I’ll get a peek at her ass. Maybe it’ll get me excited. He grinned. Maybe I’ll even get an erection. Wouldn’t that be a hoot! Kraft tried to recall the last time he got a hard-on. The old man’s smile was dreamy. Kraft was thinking of that ass, thinking how it would look like two big flawless scoops of vanilla ice cream. As he sucked oxygen and imagined what he could do with that ass and a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup if he were only twenty years younger, the doors to the infirmary burst open and the remarkably energetic octogenarian John Fitzgerald Kennedy was wheeled in covered with blood and screaming something about poop.

  * * *

  A bored technician was glancing from one monitor to another, watching pictures from a half-dozen cells and holding rooms. When he switched to the feed from Will’s room he saw the occupant flat on the floor, flopping and twisting like a landed fish. He scrambled three guards to the room.

  * * *

  Kraft was getting a serious headache. He pushed a partition aside and watched as Kennedy was restrained by four interns. A doctor examined new head injuries laid over the old and pronounced Kennedy in stable condition, suffering minor cuts and bruises.

  “This sedative should keep him quiet and there is no danger of brain damage,” the doctor said while giving Kennedy an injection. He was uneasily aware that the Executive Director of the Compound was sitting nearby.

  “That’s because he hasn’t got any brains left to damage,” Kraft rumbled. “I don’t know why I let that bastard live.”

  “Leverage,” Zane answered instantly, hovering behind Kraft like an annoying insect. “Filthy blackmail. You used the threat of serious harm to the President to stop any future Kennedy or their apostles from seeking higher public office and working people up. Of course,” Zane added, “It didn’t really work on Bobby since he thought he was such a pistol, but we managed to show him a real pistol in the end, didn’t we, boss?”

  Kraft grimaced and sucked more oxygen. “Be quiet Zane, you blatherskite. The doctor may hear so much that I’ll have to have him killed.” The doctor stared in horror as if expecting an immediate reprisal and then scurried away. Kraft was joking of course, the doctor could live, for now. He had already decided that the doctors caring for him in his final years would not see their retirement.

  The Kennedys. Kraft shook his head. They had been one of his greatest sources of vexation. He was so tired of them! How many years, decades, had he spent carefully orchestrating their public embarrassments and private accidents, reducing them to punch lines on the Tonight Show so they would never again hold sway over the people like they once had? They breed like rats too, Kraft thought. Sometimes he wondered if he was going to have to oversee the genocide of one entire family tree.

  Kraft smacked his lips. All of this activity was making him tired and hungry. He wanted to relax with some warm milk. That was one of the perks of being in charge of an agency experimenting with cloning, he thought. There are always has a few wet nurses on hand to feed the newborns. There was a cute brunette who had just started in maternity. Her outrageously pointy milk-engorged breasts were Kraft’s idea of heaven. It would take some serious suckling to unwind after a day like this.

  * * *

  Three black-clad guards burst into Will’s room. They weren’t taking any chances. They’d seen a few uncensored portions of his file in an orientation just after he was brought in and that had been enough for them. Two kept pistols aimed at Will’s head while the third leaned forward slowly, a stun gun in hand, and examined the thrashing man.

  Will’s eyes were wide open, showing only the whites. His face had gone a plum-colored, as if he weren’t getting any air. His mouth was open and his chest was working furiously. He jerked and blood sprayed out of his mouth. He started thrashing with greater violence.

  The man holding the stun gun unclipped a small radio from his belt and called for the Compound’s EMTs.

  * * *

  Jeannie was going through another physical. She was sick of it. She hadn’t been in the infirmary more than a minute before a big woman guarding her and the brusque, older female doctor had pulled off her clothes and slipped a hospital gown over her head. They put her on an examination table, her feet up in stirrups. The doctor completed a quick and thorough cervical exam and then almost pushed her off the examination table to hand her a plastic bottle and watch while Jeannie produced a tiny urine sample. Then the doctor drew blood.

  The room they were in wasn’t much more than a few cloth and metal dividers on casters set around the examination table and a chair and table for the doctor. They had come directly in through a nearby door, but Jeannie could hear murmured conversations and a few minutes ago, some yelling. She could also feel drafts of air moving about and thought they were in one corner of a much larger room.

  The doctor looked around, frowning. “Where are the scales?”

  The guard shrugged, and gestured toward one of the dividers.

  The doctor grumbled as she shone a light into Jeannie’s eyes.

  * * *

  Johnny was lying on a stretcher. He felt funny. His mouth was dry. Whenever he acted up they always gave him a needle and put him on a stretcher or in bed, and he had to lie there and feel funny with a dry mouth. He looked to one side. His head felt like it weighed a million, billion pounds. There was a man even older than him sitting on a stool with a little plastic mask over his face, sucking air and shaking his head. He looked the other way. Uh-oh, he though. Private patient! They have somebody behind those curtains! He wondered if the patient was all messed up. Is that why they were hidden? Maybe they were naked. There were many other beds in this hospital room, and there were people in a couple of them. But somebody special got to hide behind the curtains. Johnny wondered who it was. He squinted, looking real close.

  Another man, thrashing silently, was wheeled into the infirmary just as Kennedy had been. Kraft watched them wheel the gurney among a cluster of monitors and crash carts, wondering what the holy hell was going on here today. The guy on the gurney was jerking and twitching like he had a hot coal up his keister. His face was obscured by blood, and Kraft looked away. On the far side of the room he saw motion, and a doctor in a white coat stepped into view, leading a woman to an upright scale against the wall. Holy cripes, he thought.

  * * *

  Stella opened her eyes. Her breasts hurt. One hurt a hell of a lot more than the other did. Her head hurt. That little bitch had really knocked the shit out of her yesterday. She’d been given a series of shots and had what felt like a thousand stitches in her right breast. A Compound physician had prescribed bed rest, but it didn’t seem to have done any good. She still felt like shit. She wanted to kill the little whore who had disfigured her, but she knew that she’d never get another shot at the bitch. Her contact with Ms. Norman had already been written up in a severe disciplinary memo.

  She looked down the row of beds. She was still in the same end of the infirmary, still stuck between the two macho assholes that looked almost like Ken dolls. At the end of the row was a young woman curled up on her side, her long dark hair shining like polished jet. Christ, Stella thought, what she wouldn’t do for a fistful of Tylenol.

  * * *

  Dicks and Richards were the macho asshole bread that made a Stella sandwich. Richards was out like a light, having undergone surgery to remove the small caliber bullets buried in his flesh. Dicks was awake, but stoned. That was good; as soon as the effects of the little blue pills he was popping like Pez began to wear off he started feeling like a pack of small sharp-toothed animals were chewing away at his nose and cheek and gums. His head was swollen in so many p
laces it felt like a balloon. He knew the dark-haired looker between him and his sleeping partner was a tracker, but he had no idea why she was so beat up. She also seemed to have a bunch of bandages under her pajama top like she got stabbed in the tit or something.

  “Cwytht all fuggin mighty,” he muttered, realizing that speech was now almost impossible. He should have been getting some rest but he couldn’t sleep. He always slept on his stomach, but with his mouth and nose as fucked-up as they were pressing his face down into the pillow was like pressing it into a bed of hot coals. Dicks was bored, and hurting. There was an aggravating itch under the bandages on his nose and cheek. There had been a little commotion down at the far end of the room but he couldn’t tell what had been going on. He watched without much interest as two women stepped into view from behind one of those movable white curtain thingies that he wished he had around his own fucking bed.

  The babe with the injured tit said, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  Richards, bandaged from the neck down and looking like the Mummy in one of those old Hammer horror movies, stirred and moaned.

  Dicks realized who he was looking at and said, “Thweet Jethuth.”

  Richards opened his eyes to see what was bugging his partner.

  * * *

  Betsy sat up. She was sleepy. What was this, a hospital? What was going on? The last thing she knew, she’d been following the white convertible on her bike. She rubbed her eyes. Man, what a dream. She’d dreamed that some long-haired, dark-skinned guy had been making love to her, and now this weirdness. The first thing she focused on was a woman of about thirty-five. The woman’s rear-end was exposed, and Betsy mumbled, “That’s a great ass.” She knew it was a great ass, because it was her ass. Looking at the woman was like looking at a fun-house mirror that distorted the image not by width or height, but by time. With a jolt of recognition that brought her fully awake she realized who she was looking at.

  * * *

  Jeannie stepped out from behind the curtain. The hospital gown she was wearing left her ass hanging out. She tried to hold the flimsy garment closed in back but that just drew it tight across her breasts, like she was a pin-up sweater girl from the fifties. She concentrated on the scale. She stepped up and the gown slipped open again.

  * * *

  Randall Kraft. John F. Kennedy. Stella D’Oro. Dick Richards. Richard Dicks. Betsy Jones. They all recognized Jeannie at the same time.

  Kraft’s sharp, ancient eyes zeroed in on her backside and the rest of the room quickly faded away.

  Johnny thought that the woman in white had a real cute ass and he giggled because the word ass always made him giggle and because he could see it, her actual bare ass, and then he saw her face and thought she looked just like the woman in his dreams who was all kissy and wiggly and silver on top, although she didn’t look silver on top anymore.

  Dicks and Richards both began cursing her.

  Stella looked around for something, anything, she could use as a weapon. This might be her one and only chance to get back at the whore.

  “Bitch-mother!” Betsy hissed, leaping out of bed.

  * * *

  Will figured the time was right to bring his little act to an end, since it looked like the M.D. was going stick the business end of a large syringe in his arm. He’d been holding his breath for long periods of time, giving his face a discolored look, and he’d bitten his tongue to get a mouthful of blood and let it spray out of his mouth. He was staring at the ceiling trying to keep his gaze fixed, and he thought the doctor or medics milling around him had told the guards to back off for the time being because his peripheral vision didn’t show anyone wearing black. He just hoped that Jeannie was around somewhere.

  * * *

  The doctor nudged the counterweights on the scale this way and that, and finally made a note on her chart. “Well,” she said icily, you seem to have lost two whole pounds since yesterday.

  “What do you know?” Jeannie said, wanting to somehow get back to Will. “I finally got some good news.”

  * * *

  Compound West Chief Security Officer Ted Galderson was in the central security station trying to make sense of yesterday’s activity, leafing through a stack of reports and wondering where he should begin. The computer on his desk had a large screen, displaying random views from cameras in key locations throughout the facility. He saw numerous shots of the desert around Big Blue Rock, for the most part quiet again after the flurry of activity yesterday.

  Three miles away a bus had recently disgorged a group of people who began scrambling about and chipping at rocks with tiny hammers. Either a geology class or some rock hounds on an outing. Galderson hated both. What the hell kind of way was that to spend New Year’s Day? He scrambled security teams to keep an eye on them from a distance. Two San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department squad cars had made slow passes on the highway, probably looking for Deputy Johnson.

  Both the autoport and the heliport on Compound West’s ground level were deserted except for a few mechanics in greasy overalls. The commissary was busy. He looked at his watch. The eight am shift change was coming up and the coffee and donuts were flying. The armory was locked down and silent. The seven entrances to Big Blue Rock were secure, including the huge rooftop door over the heliport. The infirmary was busier than usual, but with all the activity in the last few hours . . .

  The view again switched automatically. The Floor, an open area over which many catwalks and offices including Galderson’s were suspended on cables, was quiet. The wide thoroughfare known as Main Street was almost deserted. Main Street led to the heliport and the autoport, and the cage containing the two idiots from the press.

  “Hold on,” Galderson said. With a couple of mouse clicks the view on the computer screen switched back to the Infirmary, split into four separate images of the hospital facility. “You’re kidding me.”

  Doctor Mondani had studied enough recent historical data to know the effects Jeannie Norman had on susceptible individuals. He had suggested that Galderson keep Norman confined to a holding room and had also recommended that her medical exams, necessary since the fitness of a fully adult human clone who had survived on its own for so long had never been studied, be conducted in private rooms by female staff.

  Despite what Galderson had told the medical staff, there she was in the infirmary separated from others in the room by a few flimsy partitions, and not far away were D’Oro, Dicks and Richards, all of whom Galderson had decided would be better off not being exposed to Ms. Norman again. With them was the mystery girl Godson had brought into the Rock, now leaping out of bed in a hospital gown, her titties bouncing and her long black hair flying out behind her.

  As if all this weren’t bad enough, at the other end of the room Kraft and Zane and what was arguably the best kept secret in the history of the Compound, a very much alive but essentially brainless JFK, were all in close proximity to one another, as well as a fourth man who appeared to be William Hill.

  “What a goddamned Donkey Show this is turning into,” Galderson said, leaning forward to switch on his intercom and scramble every available guard to the infirmary.

  * * *

  Al was sitting on his too short bed and staring at the door when a low panel a foot long and six inches high was raised and a tray bearing cereal, toast and a pint of milk was slid across the floor into the cell.

  The men monitoring Al’s cell and the guards in the hall wondered why the hell they were bothering to feed the big cop when they were supposed to be getting rid of him, but they figured Galderson was just being cautious. With more and more details from day to day life finding their way into computers it was getting harder than ever to make someone disappear, and the fact that the big man was a peace officer was just more fuel in the fire that would begin to burn when he was eventually reported missing. At least they were getting some breaks.

  Ever since Galderson had left the holding room yesterday the cop had remained perched on the edge
of his bed, staring at nothing. He hadn’t moved much at all, at least not that anyone could see. Aside from getting up to piss once or twice the cop hadn’t moved from his perch on the end of the bed. He just sat and stared, blinking slowly every thirty seconds or so, like a lizard in the sun. The technicians and guards figured Johnson was in a deep state of shock. They’d seen it happen before; just because he was a cop didn’t mean he couldn’t blow a few mental fuses when the stress got to be too much to bear. They didn’t even give him the standard shout of “Move back from the door,” when they slid the tray through the slot, figuring it wouldn’t register on the big man.

  If forced to explain what the hell he was doing, Al would have given a slightly embarrassed shrug and said he had indeed become frozen, but not with fear. Al had simply gone upstairs, as Mikey sometimes said when the man was deep in thought.

  Al knew he was never going to be a rocket scientist. He was a man of action, and his intelligence and knowledge were best suited to getting him up off his butt and headed toward whatever his goal was. He wasn’t the kind of guy who could pass anguished hours mulling over the darker side of his countrymen. He had been locked up by guys who were dirty and couldn’t see any way out. So he sat and waited for something to happen, and in the back of his mind he was reviewing his life, remembering all the things that had brought him to this point. He recalled his youth in Atlanta and the fights he got into whenever he looked at some bigger white kid the wrong way, and the simple pleasure he derived from kicking white ass on the basketball court during his high school years in Bakersfield. He recalled the abrupt speed with which he was hustled through boot camp and shipped off to Vietnam after enlisting and his alarm when he saw how many brothers were being fed into the machine. He saw the angry red faces of his white instructors at the police academy in Los Angeles, and the guarded looks that many white fellow officers gave him. He’d had more hairy moments as a policeman in L.A. than he’d had overseas. Al smiled slightly, reliving the move to Sunday Morning. His first meeting with Mikey was always fresh in his mind, the way that skinny little white boy who’d never seen an African American up close had studied Al intently, and announced after touching one of the man’s large hands, “Your skin is real dark. It’s pretty neat.”